#kbag

The day of my weekly trip to visit my mother in Streatham. Sometimes I take a succession of buses all the way there, but when I’m in more of a hurry I typically take the Tube to Stockwell, then the No. 50 bus to Streatham High Road. Today, as I waited outside Stockwell station to cross Clapham Road, I spotted two young women tying bunches of flowers to a lamp-post on the other side of the street. I knew immediately why they were doing it – a day or so before I had read in the Evening Standard that a woman had been killed in a hit-and-run incident there. Eyewitnesses said the car was speeding. It's not clear from reports so far if it went through a red light.

As I got closer I saw that one woman was crying. They both turned away and began to walk slowly up the road. I looked to see if there was anything attached to the lamp-post about the woman who died, but it was just flowers. The women turned to look back again, and I felt like saying something but decided it was none of my business. I spotted something about King’s College London on a bag, or perhaps a T-shirt one of them was wearing, and I wondered if they had all been students together. My bus went into service shortly after and I saw them on a corner, hugging. Perhaps they all lived in a house down that side street.

Still on the bus, not far from Streatham Hill station, some graffiti caught my eye. It was a tag that appeared to say ‘LOVER’, which I recognised as being the nickname used by one of the three young men who died at Loughborough Junction on 18 June. I’m not entirely sure it was done by the same person, because the design of the tag, incorporating a heart symbol, seemed to be different to other examples I found online, but perhaps he varied the design. Certainly, the location – outside the entrance to the rail depot at Streatham Hill – seemed to be the kind of place he would have gone to paint graffiti on the sides of trains and on walls by the tracks.

After leaving my mother’s at about 8:30 pm, I decided to walk back to the entrance to the rail depot on Sternhold Avenue, to take some photos of the graffiti. As forecast, following an unpleasantly hot and muggy day, it had clouded over. The skies, just after sunset, threatened imminent rain but looked pretty dramatic, and I reached the spot at just the right time to get a few shots in the fading light.

Further down Sternhold Avenue it did indeed start to rain. I persisted as far as Thornton Avenue, but the rain had become rather heavy, so I took shelter at a bus stop. I fancied a beer, so I pondered whether to take a 255 to Balham and the Wetherspoon’s there, or to take a 50 instead. Then it occurred to me that the 50 would pass by the Windmill on Clapham Common, a pub I used to go to sometimes in the 1980s when I lived nearby. As it happened, the 50 came first, so I decided to take it.

The Windmill was quite different to how I remembered it. The interior was uninviting, with nowhere to sit that seemed particularly quiet or comfortable. What hadn’t changed was the beer (Young’s), so I opted for the regular Young’s Bitter, which is a decent ale, but I was surprised at the price (£4.55), and while drinkable it wasn't on top form.

It was still raining, but there was covered seating out front, so I decided to drink my beer there. I felt like just looking at (and listening to) the rain. The only problem was the proximity of the table I chose to a noisy group of people sitting inside a kind of shack. Some of them soon left, but those remaining continued to make noise, in particular a man who started singing what appeared to be a humorous adaptation of Melanie’s ‘Brand New Key’. Then I remembered the Wurzels’ parody version, ‘Combine Harvester’, so more likely it was derived from that. Although I couldn’t make out what his improvised lyrics were saying, it was clear they didn’t scan properly with the melody line.

But irritating as it was, the noise was faint enough that I still quite enjoyed sitting there for half an hour or so, looking out over the darkening common, with the twinkling lights of the traffic on the nearby main road.

Having finished my drink, I walked to Clapham South station, from where I took the Northern line to Angel – I wanted to buy something at the branch of Tesco on Islington Green – and then caught a 341 back to Harringay.

Upstairs on the bus I noticed some people in the front seats. A heavily built, middle-aged woman, who I thought might be Dutch or German, was talking to a younger woman sitting next to her. The younger, Muslim woman – wearing a blue headscarf and perhaps in her late twenties – was asking the other woman about her work: evidently she was or had been a teacher of young children. At first I thought they knew each other, but when the older woman started talking in what sounded like an Eastern European language to the couple on the adjacent seats, it became apparent that they did not and had perhaps just got into conversation on the bus.

After a noticeable pause, the older woman resumed conversation in English with the Muslim woman. She asked her what she had studied (she replied that she had done business studies, with, I think, a master’s in accounting). But when asked if she was working, the Muslim woman, who had previously seemed calm and relaxed, began to look troubled. I could only hear snippets of what she said: she couldn’t work because of her mental state. ‘I’m a refugee,’ she said. Then something about ‘I thought he would marry me …’, that the accommodation she was currently living in, provided by the council, was ‘unsafe’, and that she often preferred to stay in her room out of fear. She wanted to move, she said. She spoke with what sounded like an Indian accent, so I wondered if she came from Afghanistan.